Rachel Kushner's second novel, “The Flamethrowers,” unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel I can remember. It plays out as if on Imax, or simply higher-grade film stock.

In part this is a function of the novel's unfamiliar settings, including the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, where the book's young narrator briefly becomes, as one character puts it, “the fastest chick in the world.” The book also touches down in politically turbulent Italy in the 1970s.

In part it's the simple fact that Kushner can really write. Her prose has a poise, wariness and moral graininess that put you in mind of weary-souled visionaries like Robert Stone and Joan Didion.

This wariness lurks beneath a sensibility that's on constant alert for crazy, sensual, often ravaged beauty. A fish head on a plate resembles “a shorn airplane fuselage.” An auburn beard tumbles down a man's chin “like hillside erosion.”

One young woman, an artist-cum-waitress named Giddle, is described at a club this way: “She shone like something wet, a piece of candy that had been in someone's mouth.”

“The Flamethrowers” is a coming-of-age novel of a sort, one that has dozens of topics on its mind: speed and sex, reality and counterreality, art and intellect, politics and fear and perhaps, above all, “the fine lubricated violence of an internal combustion engine.”

It's a language-obsessed book. “All you could do with words,” one character says, “was turn them on their sides like furniture during a bombardment.”

Kushner's novel is set in the mid-1970s. Its narrator, a woman in her early 20s, has come to New York to turn her fascination with motorcycles into an art career. We know her only as Reno. Reno is a persuasive and moving narrator because Kushner allows her the vulnerability and fuzzy-mindedness of youth while rarely allowing her to think or say a commonplace thing.